6 hiring tips for home health care

April 25, 2018

Delivering high-quality home health care depends on who's on your team. It's impossible to deliver high-quality care without the right people on board across all departments of your home health agency, from clinical to administration support.

But the quality of your hires depends on your recruitment strategy. Make the best hires for your HHA with these six tips:

1. Create a great candidate experience"Candidate experience" is one of the buzziest phrases of the year, and for good reason: Creating a seamless, stress-free application process makes a positive impression on candidates and is more likely to lead top talent to accept an offer at your agency. A bad candidate experience generates bad press, too, with 72 percent of job applicants sharing their negative experience on review sites such as Glassoor, according to a study by Future Workplace.

Here are the hallmarks of a great candidate experience – let them guide your recruitment strategy:

Timeliness: Recruitment can be time-intensive, but if candidates are left waiting to hear from you they may be picked up by another agency. Keep the process moving.

Communication: Regularly update candidates on their status and stay in regular communication with them throughout the recruitment process.

Simplicity: If people have to jump through hoops to apply for a job at your organization, they're going to look elsewhere. Streamlined, intuitive application processes are best.

2. Reach right-fit applicants Another key to making great hires in home health is effectively reaching right-fit candidates. Advertise postings on social media sites such as LinkedIn and health care job boards. Work with a recruiter who specializes in the home health field and ensure they're fully briefed on the scope and demands of the job.

Make sure people can apply for jobs at your agency on their smartphones, too, as 78 percent of millennials and 73 percent of Generation Xers used mobile devices to search for jobs in 2016, according to findings from the Pew Research Center.

Creating a great candidate experience helps you keep top talent interested.

3. Offer competitive salary and flexible benefits To attract the most qualified clinicians and administrative support staff, you need to offer competitive salary and benefits packages. Ensure the standard elements are there – great health insurance and retirement savings plans, for example, but also consider offering other non-typical benefits that are growing in popularity, such as generous PTO days, student loan repayment assistance and financial advisory services.

4. Look for soft skills Of course, any new hire to your HHA needs to have the right technical and medical skills for the job, but it's also important to hire for soft skills, especially in patient-facing roles. Soft skills to look for include:

Effective written and verbal communication.

Creative problem solving.

Collaboration and teamwork.

Time management.

5. Plan onboarding Onboarding may seem like the last thing to think about when it comes to recruitment, but it deserves front-and-center attention. A great onboarding process is part of creating a positive candidate experience, and a structured program can help new hires hit the ground running. A strong onboarding process is one that includes ample training time and familiarizes the new hire with the teams and workflows of your agency.

6. Stay organized Staying organized throughout the recruitment process helps improve the experience for both employer and employee. An EMR like Thornberry's NDoc® solution can help you HHA keep things running smoothly while more resources and time are devoted to recruitment efforts.

The success of your HHA depends on the quality of its hires. Follow the six tips above to attract top talent and keep them on board through great application experiences.